


the northern girl (winterfell's daughter)

by SearchingforSerendipity



Series: the old and secret whispers 'verse [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: ASoIaF Kink Meme, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Feminist Themes, Gen, Ghosts, Magic, Old Gods, Sansa-centric, Warging, Witch! Sansa, Worldbuilding, taken to a new level
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 20:20:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7478583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She lives for the dreaming. </p><p>In the day, she was a hostage, but at night she was a phantom in the castle, the shadow of a shadow in a dream, in dozens of dreams."</p><p> </p><p>Sansa loses her wolf. Something in her breaks apart, cracks open. And  through the gaping hole, strange whispers come through.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the lady is dead long live the lady

**Author's Note:**

> witch!Sansa  
> Anonymous  
> April 15 2014, 18:05:41 UTC COLLAPSE  
> "The Northern girl. Winterfell's daughter. We heard she killed the king with a spell, and afterwards changed into a wolf with the big leather wings of a bat, and flew out the tower window."
> 
> AU where this really is what happened.

 

 

**  
0**

 

 

 

  
_"Damn her! What's wrong with that girl?"_

_"She lost her wolf." Explains Bran, knowing it will not sound as anything more than an excuse. Last night he had dreamt of a chained wolf struggling to open leathery wings, and every night Summer stops his hunt to stand by Lady's grave. Mourning, remembering. Waiting._

_Bran tries to explain, but it gets stuck in his throat. These men, warrior's waiting for the judgement of a crippled little lord, do not understand how many different chains there are. How many different ways there are to grow wings._

 

 

 

 

  
**i**

 

 

Funerals in the North are great events. There are communal prayers in the godswood, feasting in honor of the deceased, with much wine and warm fires and telling of stories. The Wardens of the North have their tombs, down down Winterfell's depths, a sculpture and throne for each of them.

The ladies of the North have their own ways. Their wives and daughters and sisters are laid to rest under the heart tree. Candles are lit in every window and for that night the whole of wintertown is silent as snowfall. Only the howling breaks the quiet, the sounds of tearing skin and growling echoing in the cold air.

 

  
Sansa, it was agreed by all that knew her, was a happy, sweet child. Stark solemness seemed to have skipped her over entirely, putting its share on young Arya and wild Rickon. Sansa, all soft hands and soft voice and soft, searching eyes had a tendency to see everything as of in a dream.

She was a child. How could anyone blame her for being a child?

 

 

 

When Lady dies, Sansa breaks.

(more than she knows at the time, but then, she did not know much at the time)

She blames Arya, her commoner friend, Nymeria. Her Lord Father, but she hated hating him so she did not think of it. Even then she knew she had lost something never to be regained again, become lesser. So she clings to her beliefs, of good queens and courtly princes, love that never fails, never falters. She wants that for herself, nothing but babies and crowns and silks, and Lady's absence splinters her from the inside, cleaves her open and bare.

It should be enough for her to stop trusting the royal family. But the eyes see what they want, the heart builds world's out of sighs. If Joffrey feels slippery beside her, she puts it down to sweat and hot southern airs. He was too beautiful to hate. If the Queen brings to mind rusted gold, cups of blood, she chides herself and turns her thoughts to presenter matters. King's Landing is so very bright; there is nothing odd at all about the constant noise, the way it sticks to her ears even in the quiet of the Tower of the Hand.

She tells herself this and is appeased, for a time. That is the nature of lies, though she does not know it then. They are slippery and they spread through the mind like moss in the shadows. They grow, parasites to truth, warm and so very comfortable.

She builds a castle in her mind, all tall towers and pretty lies, with a wall of blue stone like the sea in the morning light. It shines so invitingly, drowns out everything she doesn't like to hear.  
  
(Inside her something tightens and withers and dies, gone forever. It makes her resentfully, achingly lost. Desperate, desperately trying to keep her dreams alive, make them real from the strength of her wishing.)

 

  
She was little, three or four, when she had gotten lost.

Mother had gone away to look at her little noisy sister, leaving her alone with a maid. Mother had told her to wait, and she had meant to wait, she _had_. But the maid had fallen asleep and Sansa had finished her embroidery, every stitch as neat as she could make, and she had wanted to show it to Mother _now_. She longed to have mother brush a hand through her hair and tell her what a good little lady and she was, or help her fix the few crooked stitches until they were perfect. Before dinner she would show them to Father and he would kiss her forehead and he too would tell her how beautiful it was.

When Mother had taken so very long to come back, though, Sansa had steeled herself. She was, after all, a lady. And the maid was snoring. She knew where the nursery was, and anyway Arya made so much noise she would have no trouble finding it. Back as straight as she could make it, she set out on her quest, feeling like a princess from the songs, only not, because it was such a short adventure.

It was no all that short, after all. She had tried to follow the sounds, but the babe was silent and the cleaning maids must have done all their work for the day, because she didn't find many of them, and the one she found the nodded at and continued on a little faster, before they tried to make her return to the sitting room. After a while the corridors started getting longer, though, without any sounds. She glimpsed a flowing dress and run towards it, only to realize it was a curtain, fluttering in the cold wind. It made her shiver and sneeze.

Then, after she had stopped recognizing the walls around her readily, she had meant to find Robb or Jon or Papa. Her eyes started filling, mind wandering to the scary stories Old Nan told. She told herself not to stop walking. Little Sansa, holding her embroidery hoop in shaking fingers, scared and trying not to show it, because true ladies were never scared, kept waiting for a good knight to come save her, or at least her Papa.

And one did. She didn't remember it for many years, but one did help her.

 

 

This is what she did not remember, because she never knew it: Winterfell was a great castle. It had bowels that went deep and dark, but none so deep or dark as the crypts of the Starks. When Catelyn returned to the room after hours of searching, there she was, sitting near the window and chatting away to clear air.

When she saw her, Sansa hugged her tightly and told her all about dear Ser Brandon, that had helped her find her way back and told her such wonderful stories about their family, and did she know, his wife had been named Sansa as well?

Catelyn held her daughter close to her chest. She nodded in all the right places while she called off the search and sent for the sleepy maid to be punished. All the while she brushed her daughter's hair, slowly.

Before she left the room, she looked back. The window she had left closed was open, entirely too high for a little girl to lift, and when a cold draft blowed in. It made red weirwood leaves drift in, falling softly beside a child's embroidery hoop.

 

 

Then Joffrey has Father's head cut off, the sword falls, and nothing can muffle the ringing silence.

  
(but that is not all that happens, is it?)

 

  
Sansa was a sweet little lady. Southern eyes, southern hair, a southerner's airs made for a pretty picture. As soft as a doll and as courteous as her mother, with a small army of siblings. Little feuds and spats and a world shaped by love, warm walls even in the dead of winter. The past was a faded dreamlike land and the future was early spring buds, blooming in her mind's eye.

Sansa was a sweet little lady. So, of course, nobody thought she could ever be anything else. She had never wanted to be anything else, until--

 

 

Father dies and there is silence.

And suddenly she can hear _everything_.

 

 

 

 

 

  
**ii**

 

 

  
The bells rang high and clear. A daughter was born, it was said in wintertown, a Stark daughter with strange eyes, already clear and her lady mother's hair. Kissed by fire, the old women say. The first of the Lord's children to be born in the castle's walls, the old men say. The smallfolk, drunk on free wine, praised and toasted her name, calling Sansa, Sansa Stark, long may she live, fair may she me, strong she might prove herself!

Even northern blessings are harsh, demanding things.

The bells rang high and clear when a daughter was born to the direwolves. Nothing echoed in the godswood, nothing dared rebound in its sacred silence, but on that day, the bells rang high and clear enough to make the branches tremble, enough to make the hot lake ripple.

  

 

After, she lies in bed for days.

Sansa cries. She sleeps the days away, refuses food, refuses to leave the bed. Would refuse to breathe if her lungs didn't betray her. Does not have the strength to move, to breathe. When Joffrey takes her to see her Father's rotting face, one among the sea of her childhood companions, it is with detached loathing that she considers the fall, the way Joffrey's bones might crack under her weight even as they bled out into a single puddle.

The Hound stops her. At the time she is to tired to hate him as well for it. At the time she does not know enough to be thankful for it.

Her dreaming is restless. Shapes, she sees, disjointed moments: scrubbing the ground, the Keep's pink stone digging at her knees, kissing the stable boy behind the hay stack, stalking around the Keep in the dark. Court is a spider nest, venom in every tongue, making the nobles' thoughts a deadly sort of sticky. They cling to her dreams, playing games of shadows and cruelty and greed that stay with her after she wakes. It makes for restless sleep, meandering wanderings in the hours that stretch on every day.

  
One night she dreams of the Queen. She is in her chamber's; Sansa knows this, despite never having walking through the threshold, the same way she knows to curtsy deeply and fill her glass every four gulps in. She goes to lift the bottle, wrapping her fingers firmly around the Arbour Red. Her hands are wrong, too small and hard, with broken nails.

Sansa realizes with a start that Queen Cersei is speaking to her. Speaking at her, more dismissive than even to a traitor's daughter.

'Search her things. Listen to what she says, especially what she does not say. Any mention of her father's treason is to be reported. We mustn't have the little bird thinking she can fly.'

Cersei tosses back her wine, waves her hand. Sansa rises, is leaving the rooms while wondering what gossip Evlin might have about the new lady they're supposed to spy on when she noticed the Queen's bed. The canopy has lion motifs in woven gold, the linen is spotless red, and at its feet a fur, a soft grey she would know anywhere. She moves forward, hand extended to touch it, but the Queen is looking out of the window and the walls press closer, closer.

She wakes up sweating. That morning she recognizes the maids by name, work, favorite chores. When a girl with thick knuckles goes to brush her hair she picks up the brush herself, tries not to imagine running it over warm heaving flanks of grey fur.

 

 

 

The next night she dreams of a bird in flight. Not a spot in the sky seen far away; she is the bird, bore up by the wind and light, capable wings. Underneath her King's Landing sprawls on, The Red Keep and the Great Sept of Baelor and the Dragonkeep, all puny pieces of a children's game.

In her dream the wind ran north and the sky stretched on and onwards, ever grayer, and no one could ever catch her.

 

 

 

Life goes on outside of dreams. Her presence is requested at court most every day. She has learned much in the time after her father's death, most importantly to her survival is that what the King wants the King has, exactly as he wants it. Joffrey's playthings are used often and discarded only after outliving their interest.

(She knows that because Evlin had had a sister once, because Jacon had been the one cleaning up the cat bits afterwards, because all the servants in the castle had lived in fear of the King's cruelty since he was seven and shoved old Coria down the stairs to see how her head cracked and cried egg! egg! in his high childish voice.

Sansa knows things she should not know, but there is always so much she does not yet know. )

Every day spent at court is a day Joffrey has her beaten.

That is not quite true. On the days she finds an excuse not to go he has her beaten as well, coming to her quarters and demanding the Kingsguard to hurt her to his pleasure. They have to, she understands on a basic level. It is their duty. But it is not duty she feels guiding them when they punch and kick her, thoughts and emotions far too close even through mail and cloth.

It is torture - the physical pain pales to the struggle of it. It is not the seamless skin change of her dreaming or cautious brushing of her more adventurous forays, but true strikes from the flesh to the marrow of her being, every hurt coming with layer upon layers of _anger-hate-boredom-delight-desire_. Rarely regret. And her own fear, her pain and despair the counter point to it all, a punishment of her own making.

Only Alys Oakheart does not hurts as the others do, his blows softer, his conscience heavier. It does nothing to make up for the wounds the others place on her. Sansa hurts more than she ever thought possible. Not just from the beating, of the body and the spirit, but the knowledge, unshakable and undeniable, that men are foul, cruel creatures. That the white-cloaked heroes of her songs are brutes with only pain in mind, or weak, or craven.

All the songs were lies; Littlefinger told her that once. She would believe that if she had not peeked into his mind one day and found only hunger, deep never-to-be-sated hunger, for power and coin and her.If she did not have her dreaming, she would have trusted him. It is one more thing to keep her away at night, one more horror to squash before waiting for blessed sleep to come.

Her tells her she has honest eyes, eyes many men would drown in when she grows older. Sansa smiles, blushes, looks properly charmed and terrified of his intentions. She thinks, yes they will, thinks, you are wrong, i have summer eyes like the winter sky before the last snow, father said so and father never lied you lie.

He is right, in one matter. It will have to be when she is older. She will have to be patience, careful. Courteous. Sansa is a lady; these virtues suit her ever so well.

 

 

 

She lives for the dreaming. Sansa knows that for every moment of anguish in the waking world in her dreams, when she shed her skin and partook on another's mind, she was more in control as she had ever been in her life. In the day, she was a hostage, but at night she was a phantom in the castle, the shadow of a shadow in a dream, in dozens of dreams.

It isn't easy; it hurts. Sometimes more than the beatings. Minds aren't smooth places: they're rough, unreliable, messy. But it comes to her that if she had accepted her -abilities- before, Father might be alive. Robb might not be a King waging a far away war, and perhaps even Lady might not have died. That is what changes everything, really: Lady died and Sansa broke without noticing and now she people who killed her left her bleeding all over the shards.

They left her bleeding, and did not think to worry what she might do with the pieces of herself, this splintered wolf-mind of hers.

 

 

  
It also comes to her that being able to look into other's minds is the only real power she has, power none know she holds. That doesn't change everything, but it changes Sansa, and that is the greatest change of all.

 

 

Joffrey's birthday is a feast day, as much as it can be. Robb is waging war in the Riverland' and Stannis, whom Sansa has never met but through her Father's muted approval, plots in Dragonstone. The realm is at war but the king is one year older, counts one damned year more among the living, so there must be a feast.

She, armed with new knowledge about the King's nature than ever before, knows to expect bloodshed on this day. It does not make it any easier to stomach it.

Ser Dontos is a drunk. She had visited him dreams once, so that she knew of his family's fate, his loneliness, how unwanted he had been all his life. She pitied him. But she also knew how weakened by drink his mind was. It made him stupid, confused, and left her with a bad taste in her mouth and ache in her head all that morning.

He still does not deserve to die.

Her determination to not be noticed on this day, when Joffrey's thirst for blood flies high, is gone in a moment.

"Stop!" She calls, and miraculously, Joffrey does. She takes her chance, babbling faster than she can think. Yet the words are sure and she is surprised to realize she knows she is speaking the truth, knows it in her bones. "Your Grace, do not hurt this man. Do you not know the curse that comes upon he who slays a man on his nameday?"

It had started as a lie but it begins with rare certainty. The other lords and ladies look at her askance, dare not speak out without knowing what will happen. She knows their ways now, their wants and loyalties, but it is not on them that her mind rests. She is thinking on Joffrey, thinking to him, of the terrible fate she knows will come to pass if he does kill Dontos.

Joffrey blinks, for a moment, and for that one moment Sansa sees herself through her eyes, the feast, the sky.

In the end, it is the Hound that speaks. His words of agreement support hers, save Dontos' life. Sansa curtsies, praises Joffrey's mercy. Her mouth is filled with blood, bitter and hot in her tongue. She is trying not to smile.

All the knights are monsters, all the ladies are weak. She wonders what that makes her.

She cannot wait to find out.

 

  
Courtesy is a lady's armor, she tells herself, hopping from servant to servant, making certain not to hurt them while using their ears, their memories. Courtesy is a lady's armor, she reminds herself, slinking from the Grand Maester's mind, trying to swallow bile and disbelief and the horrible certainty that _this is what a healer looks like, this is what a healer does, it is wrong wrong wrong._

Courtesy is a lady's armor, she concedes, haunting Cersei Lannister sleeping hours with visions of witch-ghouls and foreign prophecies, but they killed the wolf and took the furs, left the lady to fashion herself an armor out of ill-fitting truths. They can hardly blame her for finding a new needle to sew with.

 

 

 

 

  
**iii**

 

 

 

Above the Neck, a woman's first moon blood is a private thing. It means she may bear children, drink wine at all meals, court a man properly. It is the end of childhood: siblings are to be a preparation for motherhood, motherhood the rest of her life.

The only change is in her prayers. In some places of the North a a girl must be accompanied to the godswood always, but after a bleeding they might go alone. They must : to pray to the gods for a good husband, healthy children, an easy birth. The old gods are bloody gods, thirsty gods.

It is said that the pool of Winterfell is filled with the tears of a thousand Stark girls, and the thousand and one tears of Stark women.

 

 

 

Once you breach a waking mind, all others are the same.

Oh, there is variety enough. Sansa likens it to embroidery: the cloth may be of different colors and makes and textures, but the stitches are always the same. They must always be small, steady, a all of part of the final whole. Stitches should be unseen, unnoticed, but safe.

So it is with her mind wandering. She looks inside, follows the thread of one thought, patiently, until she finds what she wants or discovers something interesting. Now that she has collected at least one secret for every person in the city she has interested with, she feels more at the liberty to appreciate the minds. They are all unique. They are all people, and sometimes it awes her all over again, the realization that she can touch this part of them that is invisible.

It still scares her, how fragile they are. Cloth rips, after all. Minds break. This is not something to be tinkered with. It is not hers. She has to remind herself of this. It is not hers, it should not be hers. She forgets, sometimes.

Sometimes she cannot control it.

 

 

  
There is nothing in the world but pain. Humiliation, fear, anger, but pain rules over them all, even shame. Here she is, bruised and beaten and bleeding in front of the great nobles of the kingdom, and they are laughing. Ser Trant - does not deserve the title, even if all the songs are lies he does not deserve it - kicks the back of her legs. She falls, hard, on her knees. It makes them bleed, but that is nothing but a scratch to her battered body.

The space between her ears aches with a sound that is no sound at all. She can hear the fear that is not her own, the ladies imagining themselves in her place, the disdain of the ones that don't think to see their similarities to her. The lord's drape themselves with lust and horror both, all to ignore how fragile their positions are. Some of them pity her. In the moments between blows she hates them the most.

She looks at Joffrey instead, a little above his head. His crown is tilted. There is so much happening around her, but she focus on this: his crown, tilted in his golden curls, sliding sideways among a field of sunshine. She doesn't let herself look away. If she did she would look into his eyes, and if she did that he would die. She would kill him, and they would know it was her.

He calls for her clothes to be ripped away. Only then does she close her eyes, ashamed, angered, to look down. The pink ground grows pinker around her, her scuffed knees leaving a line of seeping red.

Trant rattles her frame to paw at her dress and she falls forward, nails digging at the stone--

There is someone before her. Not someone: something pale and burned. It has a man's shape, but it is a disfigured shape. Sansa takes him in with terror. The skin, burned beyond blisters, pulling back in his skull; the clumps of white hair; the eyes, winter white.

"Child." He says. "my child, my child's child, do not cry. Tears have power. Did Ned teach you nothing? Keep your tears to yourself. Don't let them have them."

Then he is gone, like mist in the summer air. All the breath goes out of her at the same time another blow wrecks her back. It is more painful than all the others before, leaves her sobbing and gasping. The sound of many a dozen of thoughts returns to her before she had noticed it was gone, even as her eyes rove the throne chamber for another ghost. None come and the one she saw does not return. She tries not to cry.

By the time Tyrion Lannister comes to her rescue her eye are dry. Mayhaps 'tis only her nose, but the chamber smells faintly of burned skin.

 

 

 

The Hound is a curiosity.

He refuses to beat her no matter what Joffrey orders. He saved her life from herself, and from that she is thankful. She had not had the dreaming before, had not known what she would miss if she had died that day. Still, he is hideous to look at. Not only in the way of the eyes, but the mid as well. On the rare times Joffrey has him guard her door she wills the time away in his thoughts, sailing in the brooks of his mind. He is not stupid, for all that he his very big - that idea that big warriors are of little wit does not always hold true.

His mind is a torn, shredded place, bordered with fire. His very thoughts rasp roughly against her mind, his very wonderings are scarred and hurt. He is a greater drunkard than Ser Dontos, with a greater appetite and a stronger stomach.

Yet that is not all he is. He rages against her courtesies to himself even as he protects her from others, pulls her towards the truth kicking and screaming whenever they are together alone. But there is a measure of kindness in him. She has seen it through his eyes, the way she sometimes overlaps with the sister his brother killed, the whore he first loved. He has tried to kill the boy in himself but that scared, scarred child lives still. She loves that boy a little, even as she recoiled from his face and mind as far as she can.

He is honest, that is the word for him. And hurt, but still honest. She wonders if Petyr Baelish ever saw the frankness in his eyes, or if he was like she was, and too scared to look him in the eye.

She wonders how she can look him in the eye, when so much of her is made of secrets and lies.

 

 

  
Under the Neck the godswoods are empty. There are far fewer followers of the faith, but that was an emptiness that could be filled. This was an unholy silence. The Red Keep was never silent, never to Sansa, but for the godswood. Even here she heard whispers, but those were from the wind, the forest animals.

It is late, the hour of the wolf. In the snow a girl's white gown could be confused by snow, the dark blood for sap. There is no snow this far South, this early in winter. No pool to collect a maiden's tears in. And Sansa would be a greater fool than she is to wear white to a secret meeting.

Dontos the drunkard sleeps in his straw bed of canny Florian bedding pretty Jonquil. This is not that meeting. It is secret as well, more private and more dangerous. Far older than Jonquil's tale.

Sansa Stark kneels by the heart tree of King's Landing. The oak is supplied beneath her fingers, the smoke berry vines without thorns. Nothing in it has the resistance of a true weirwood, nothing of the white bones of the North. But it is not the tree itself that concerns her, so it is nothing to her.

Sansa Stark lay her hands in the bark, each to one side of the carved face. Her hands leave a trail of red on brown oak, bark soaking the blood greedily, turning it almost as red as the eyes of the tree.

Sansa Stark looks into the tree. Her ears are clear, her mind is open. She is crying, softly, one tear at a time.

The tree cries with her, one tear at the time. It cries red and sticky with something that is not sap, is not blood. No wind passes through, no bird takes up flight, but the silence is gone, gone forever.

 

 

 

 

 

  
**iv**

 

_"You're like one of those birds from the Summer Isles, aren’t you? A pretty little talking bird, repeating all the pretty little words they taught you to recite." Ser Sandor had said. Sansa Stark had looked down and blushed, responded with something suitably courteous, because Sansa Stark was a hostage with a dead wolf and she was supposed to be afraid._

_Her mind was her own, though, and so many others besides. Nobody could hear her thinking, unafraid, fearless,_  no ser, you are wrong. I am a wolf still, a winged one, and one day i will fly away from this hell and no one will hear me singing, not even you.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kudos and comments are very appreciated!


	2. remembering is remaking the shape of an old story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She has a choice. Many, many choices. She thinks on them late at night, under the oaken canopy, standing still and stiff at court. The trees whispering is not ever-present, like that of humans, but a silent presence in the back of her spine, a new weight to the turn if her wrists. 
> 
> It is hungry. It demands to be used. Sansa is only twelve, only a child. What is a child to do with the gods' powers in her veins?

 

 

 

 

  
**v**

  

 

Once she had loved Prince Joffrey with all her heart, and admired and trusted her his mother, the queen. They had repaid that love and trust with her father's head. Sansa would never make that mistake again.

She wouldn't be able to. Lies no longer had place within her, no matter how dearly she might wish to believe them.

 

 

 

 

  
**vi**

 

 

Robb was all Tully rivers water, stubborn and bright, the bastard was Stark to the core, the first and worst of his many faults, but Sansa was different.

Catelyn's little girl wore her southern airs like a cloak but she was all Ned, all honor and ideal and a thirst for something greater than herself. If she had been born a boy, she would have made her mother of the best knight in the realm. Sansa was her treasure and her little lady, the little girl that sang old hymns under the godswood, who could recite Stark lore like she had been taught it from the cradle, or perhaps born with it.

Catelyn loves Sansa, so dearly. Her red child, her love child, so full of life. It pains her more than she could say to hear the whispers of what might be happening to her in that foul court, at the mercy of the monster-boy on the throne.

She kneels in the moss, autumn chill dampening her skirts, her skin, chilling her bones. Catelyn prays. Open-eyed, like Ned used to, staring the uncanny heart tree's face with an intent she had never felt before. Despair does strange things to one's faith.

In a moment, Robb's men, for they are truly his men, will come to take her in custody. Robb will rage and accuse and look at her with the wet eyes she used to be able to sooth. And she will no regret what she did. She has already prayed for Lannister's steadfastness, for Brienne's safety and strength. Now the plea will be her last for a long time and it will be the most valuable, her most precious wish.

"Bring her to safety," she pleads. "It need not be with me or Robb, but take her from danger. If the escape I have sent fails, give her another way out. My husband was your man until the last breath left him body." Her voice does not crack. These gods, she knows, do not look kindly upon weakness.

"I am not your woman. But my husband was yours and my children are yours as well. Please, I pray, if these trees truly have any power at all, help Sansa. If the friend I have sent her is not true, if no knight comes to champion her cause, give her wings and help her flee to better places. Her wolf is dead but she is Winterfell's daughter, she is. Remember Sansa Stark."

 

 

 

Her first bleeding comes, and the heart tree calls her. For the first time in her life, Sansa can hear them, can answer.

 

 

But first:

Some weeks before her flowering, Sansa nearly dies.

The uprising is a surprise to the royal party, too caught up in their plots to hear the cry of the people, but Sansa heard. How could she not, when so many went angry, so many women wailed for their children, so many men died for bread and measly coins? In the beginning it had been a humming at the back of her skull, like an itch or the muted sound of a busy place, when all conversations come together, indistinguishable. Either she got better at it or they got louder, because days went pass that she had no relief from the growing headache.

Joffrey does not care, not one jot, nor does his Mother. Sansa would have made them love her, if she had been Queen for truth. They would have praised her name and made her songs, and the songs about her would be true and right. As it was, she could help more than any royal would be able to, had they been so inclined.

There was an art calming a mind, the art of being the wind. Like a breeze of the kind, there and gone and unseen. Thoughts were like rivers, slow like the Blackwater or fast as mountain brooks, it mattered not. All of them rippled and ate at the shores, all of them trembled with the air. She didn't have to go in very deeply. Smooth the surface, disperse some of the currents, unblock the riverbed, and it was done.

At first she is quite awful at it. When she finally gains the nerve to do more than glimpse, she very nearly puts a rebellious stonemason to sleep when trying to calm his rage. One time she thought that perhaps by sharing the impressions of her rich meals with a washerwoman. It had seemed to work: her stomach didn't rumble as much, and she could give the food she would have eaten to her young children. Sansa had been feeling mightily pleased with herself, when the washerwoman, named Mastri, started getting weaker and weaker, and throwing up everything she ate. Scared, she'd shied away.

Mastri does end up getting better, barely. Despite the food he'd had, of her son's does not. Sansa learned to avoid sharing impressions after that. She knows the terrible grief of a mother, and how hunger twists one's judgement worse than drink.

(Varys the Spider goes to Mastri's other son and spins the boy into his web. Mastri cries when her son's comes say farewell, tongue a pink little stump, but the boy is careless of the pain and happy of his full belly.

Sansa tries to look upon the Spider's mind. His are the whispers of the realm, and even so he leaves no whisper behind his passage. His mind is blank, like snow cloaking a fortress.)

 

She is still surprised, somehow, when they pull her from the horse and drag her away.

She wants to ask _don't hurt me don't you know i'm your friend i've felt your hunger and anger and pain_ , wants to say _i hate then too more than anyone knows_. But of course they don't know her, of course that she is one of them as well in their eyes. Sansa knew that already. They scream it at her, inside and out, of injustice and cruelty and the rage they are only too glad to turn on her.

Some men are holding her. Sansa is terrified. She can hear, see their intention's as clearly as the movement of the mob around her. One of them as a club. Other has a sword, taken from a goldcloack. It drips red to the dirt, drip drip drip.

They are going to kill her. They are going to rape her and kill her and leave her body to be trampled, or maybe eaten in the soup shops. She wouldn't even have a proper funeral.

She trembles, too light for her skin, when the man with the sword steps closer. His mind is a foul thorn-field and she is surprised to realize she is not scared. She is angry.

The man grins a grin without much teeth and lifts his mace.

"Stop." She says. He stills, arm raised. The mace trembles as his tendon's shift, uncertain.

This is easier than it was at Joffrey's birthday, easier than cradling a sleeping Dontos in her arms and carding a fine comb through his mind. It is a matter of shifting her focus to accommodate the rest of the mind in her spell. It hardly takes more than a thought; that too surprises her.

It is not an unpleasant surprise.

"You will not harm me." She says, every word an edict. "You will harm no one, especially not women and children. " An idea dawns upon her, golden as morning. Tis madness, but rich with possibilities. She smiles, slowly.

"By the Father, I charge you to protect the weak. By the Mother, I charge you to do good. By the Smith, I charge you to be just..."

 

  
Scant days after the heart tree sings to her, and suddenly the sounds that had been shallow and shifting sink to her blood like sap, cloying. 

 

 

 

 

 

  
**vii**

 

 

  
The maids find her among the sheets, stained linen like petals budding around her, a different sort of flowering. She must have made a show of trying to burn them after returning from the godswood, because there was ash by the basin and an ugly smell of burn cloth in the air, but she doesn't remember it.

Her hands are red. Her head throbs, hair a comfortable weight against her back. She lets the maid named Evlin wash every finger, the valleys between them, the small knuckles, lets Jevana brush her hair a hundred strokes altogether. Let them think her a puppet in their hands.

With her eyes closed she treads Anai's mind shallowy, watching as she gives the bloodied sheets to Cersei. Reclining in her blankets, half naked herself, the Queen smiles with her cold, cold eyes. Some other woman might feel vulnerable straight out of slumber, but not a Lannister. Sansa felt a terror that was only partly hers at that cat's grin, the horror of every servant on the Keep.

'So the little bird is a woman at last.' She laughs through her throat, still rusty with sleep. 'Joffrey will be pleased. Bring her to me.'

Not as pleased as I am, Sansa thinks, withdrawing from Anai's mind. At the same time she feels Jacon sweeping in the throne room (crone help me my knees are too old for this), Evlin wondering what dress would suit Sansa better in the day of her first flowing (the lady is so pale already, nothing too dark, it will make her look half dead. but the red might seep into the yellow-), even Joffrey himself, still dreaming of spilled dog guts.

Her head felt heavy, calmer. All the noise that had given her such terrible migraines was more bearable, easier to focus on.

"I will wear the blue dress." She says, startling the maids. Her eyes are still closed. "The one with the red hem and linings." Red for blood, Lannister ruby-red, disguising also Tully colors to honor her mother. And Robb, fighting in the Riverlands, and all his men and their families.

Cersei will be wanting her to be having a family of her own. Joffrey's brats, pink faced squalling children with wormy lips. Sansa would be a blood mare, nothing but a Lannister maker; her children would not be hers, but Cersei's and Joffrey's.

 _That is never happening_ , she exults, even as she walks towards the Queen's chambers, even as she looks down and fidgets and sends terrified looks Cersei's way. _You think you have me when I am mist in your hands, untouchable._ It was a lovely thing to be assured of, that nobody would ever touch her if she did not wish it. She can bear anything as long as she knows she has that power. Lying has never came so easily to her as it does now. 

The Queen laughs when she tells her she expected her flowering to be different.

"A woman's life is nine parts mess to one part magic, you'll learn that soon enough...and the parts that look like magic turn out to be the messiest of all." She says, condescending and completely wrong. Sansa was a woman of the north, with woof blood in her. Her life was nine parts magic, and she was quite determined to clean it up the part that was a mess.

She recites some more old lies, i love his grace with all my heart, Joffrey is the rightful kind and such. All tripe, of course. This close she doesn't even have to work hard to read the Queen's mind, a mountain range of resentment, jagged borders, deep furious fear. And she has know the truth of her children's parentage for some time now. She had needed to know wether her Father had died for the truth.

Sansa looks at her, doe-eyed while sipping Arbor Red. The wine of glass she sips is too warm. She cradles the goblet between her fingers, circles the rim with the pad of a finger, child-like. Even if it is not something she had not known before, she cannot help but understand for despising the king. She wonders if her father would have been half the friend her was to Robert Baratheon if he had known how his marriage fared.

Maybe he would have. Love was a strange thing. The Queen calls it poison, sweet but poisonous, and all those who longed for it stupid and weak.

Sansa nods, suitably cowed. When she goes to refill their glasses the wine is cool, the fumes heavier, and Cersei drinks without without noticing anything amiss.

 

There are other experiences. Wool that never runs out, oil candles that shine longer and just that little bit longer. Lemon tarts that remain their taste after hours of waiting. Small things. She has to be more careful now, when trying feats others might see. It was not the same before, nobody could prove she had meddled with their wits. Everyone can see a template rising to her beckoning hand.

Sansa grows more confident with every victory after a row of tiring, frustrating attempts. More confident, and more timid. Hearing and mind-walking was never so easy, even her dreams had been hard to muddle through at the beginning. Nothing is hard enough now, it seems. Her tights are bloodied, and that means something more than the world would have it mean.

Strangely, she imagines Robb feels much as she does.

 

 

  
She has a choice. Many, many choices. She thinks on them late at night, under the oaken canopy, beneath her sheets, standing still and stiff at court. The trees whispering is not ever-present, like that of humans, but a silent presence in the back of her spine, a new weight to the turn if her wrists. It is delicately wrought and powerful, like an armor of finest gold. It is as cold as winter and she can feel it cooling her as well, molding her to sharper edges.

It is hungry. It demands to be used. Sansa is only twelve, only a child. What is a child to do with the gods' powers in her veins?

 

 

  
The time for thinking of choices and fates becomes shorter, because from dusk to dawn Sansa has suddenly acquired a court of her own.

It starts all at once and very quickly. The first one crosses her path right after she leaves the Qeen after breaking her fast, and makes her way to her room. It was a hall with many window, some of them turned towards the wall of Maegor's Holdfast. Sansa turned her head to the side, as she always did even after her father's skull had been taken away.

It is only a glimpse, a shimmer in the morning light. When she tilts her head, her heart jumps to her mouth. A sheen of silver, fluttering hair. She reaches a hand, even if she was far too slow and too far away. Ignoring the maids scurrying about she leans out of the window, expecting to see the mangled body of a child.

"You needn't worry." A voice says, right by her side. "I'm alright now, see?"

Sansa turns around, skirts swishing around her ankles. The child she had just seen falling leans in her toes, wide purple eyes peering at her. She is very young, very transparent and the whole around her belly is very deep and dark.

Sansa thinks to scream, but it gets caught in her throat.

"You're supposed to curtsy." The girl reminds her. "I'm a princess."

"I'm a princess as well." Responds Sansa without thinking. Her wits has finally returned and she does curtsy, only after checking nobody sees her. "I'm Princess Sansa of the North. My brother is a King so I am a Princess. And you're Princess Jaehaera."

"I am." She agrees. "I had a brother once too, well two, Jaeharys was my twin, but some bad men attacked use when we were visiting Grandmother and they took off his head while I was watching." She paused for a moment, contemplating. "Mother cried even more than Maelor, and he's a baby."

"Should I curtsy as well, since you are a princess?"

"You don't have to." Sansa assures. Her courtesy seems to escape her at this point, leaving her without knowing what to say. Jaehaera does not speak, choosing to stare at at her without blinking. Sansa thinks well of course she does not blink, she's dead.

"Some bad men took me father's head too." She confesses, surprising herself even as she speaks. "They made me watch.

For all that her expression does not change and her eyes are a little wider than most children, she is still kind. Her hand passes through Sansa's arm like so much air, but it is kind,y meant, and brings sudden water to her eyes.

"That's sad." Jaehaera says. "It made me very sad. You're sad like me."

Sansa swallows. "Yes."

Jaehaera nods, like she already knew, then nods again. Twisting on her heels abruptly, she walks away, fading away with each step. Sansa watches her go, hand over her chest. Her heart beat is loud, loud.

Jaehaera is not the first, exactly. There had been the scorched men from the throne room, Grandfather Rickard, and she has hazy memories of speaking to the spectrum of who could only be Brandon the Builder as s child. His stories had been the stuff of the games between her and her siblings for many moons.

It is still a shock, how in the days after her flowering more ghosts reveal themselves to her eyes. Some servants, but most Targaryens: Jaehaera's mother Heleanora, also fond of jumping from the wall of Maegar's Holdfast, Mad Raeghal running through the Keep naked as a babe. Others also, whom she only sees from the corner of her sight. All of them sufferers of violent, swift deaths, all of them a little more than dead, a little less than living.

And of course, Uncle Brandon.

He sits by her side during court, one sunny afternoon. The stained glass windows drown the room in reds and blues, rich purples that pass right through him. It gives her a fright; one moment she is sitting alone, her family's treachery as if a sickness, the other there is a man with the most abhorrent neck wound she has ever seen. It is all Sansa can do to stifle a shout.

"Greetings, niece." He says pleasantly without bothering to introduce himself. He does not have to. He looks just like Father made larger. Handsomer as well. "Awfully boring, isn't it?"

 "Not boring enough." She hisses between her teeth. Her eyes remain on Joffrey's mockery of civil justice, ignoring the ghost by her side and the sweaty beading across her brow.

 _You see nothing,_ she tells the nobles and smallfolk and servants without speaking _. You see nothing, hear nothing, I am nothing but traitor's flesh, not to be remembered._ She tries to give her mind the quality of a good leader's, but there are so few in King's Landing. Father would not need to try to sound like a lord: it came easily to him, and men all over had known to still and listen to his words.

The spell works, regardless. Only then does she turn to her Uncle.

"Jumpy one, aren't you?"

"I have reason to be."

"Hardly." Uncle Brandon protests. "You are gods-touched, girl. None of these petty runts have a sliver of a chance against you." He grins with all his teeth. "I have to admit, I am quite jealous. All the maids I could have charmed with a mind like yours..."

Her back stiffens further. She remembers Father remarking how Arya had the wolf's blood like their Uncle Brandon, and feels faintly insulted in her sister's behalf. Clearly time had softened his memory.

(the north remembers, something insists in her, but she brushes it away. arya, wild as she was, was different. kinder, and she lived. the trees did not speak of her, and yet she must be alive. she would have started haunting her otherwise.)

"My mind is mine own, nuncle. I intend to use it honorably, with regard for all." Then, because she couldn't resist, " Like my father would."

His face contorts. "Ned!" He chortles loudly, making her jump. "Ned the honorable, Ned the good. Warden of the Northh and all things true and right."

His tone makes her uncomfortable. He sounds like the Hound, but not quite. This is the Wild Wolf, she understands. And he is dead, dead and bitter with it.

He leans closer to her, so close she can see him handsome grin is in fact a snarl, barely kept civil. "Tell me, dear niece, if Ned is such a great lord father, where is he?" He extends his arms out, as if to embrace the muted sounds of court life, King'd Lading preparing for war.

"He is dead."

"So am I." He points out. "So are you. Why should Ned be at rest when he was the most dishonest of us all?"

Sansa bristles, courtesies giving place to anger. It had been so long since she felt angry like this, cutting her to the core. She hadn't let herself, before. "My Father was the most honest man of the Seven Kingdoms." She pronounces, trying to give her voice the weight of a spell. "And I am not dead."

Both statements fall into the room without echoing. Truths always echo, leave a thrumming behind themselves. Sansa shivers in the silence, the loud lack of rippling after-words. 

Uncle Brandon lifts a brow. "Aren't you? My mistake, I thought it was your wolf my brother skinned. It must have been another beribboned mongrel."

"What does Lady have to do with anything?" She asks, hating having to ask. Hating having to doubt. She was so sick of doubting everything, being wrong always.

Brandon Stark looks at her. Something shifts in his expression, turning it softer, less savage. _Pity_ , she realizes. _He pities me. He envies me, and loves me, and pities me. I never knew I could hate pity._

She opens her mouth, lips trembling. Nothing comes out.

"Sansa. Do you truly wish to keep telling yourself that pretty tale?" 

 

 

 

 

  
The next day Stannis Baratheon's armada approaches the far bank. The times for deliberating and studying was gone.

Now there was only the stillness before the blizzard.

 

 

 

 

 

  
**viii**

 

 

Mayhaps it was true that in life the monsters won, but Sansa Stark was not ready to take all the songs for lies. The wolf died and the father died and the girl lived,  when Lady and all the best parts of here were gone. In the spaces left behind she had turned into something of the old songs, the heavy northern odes she had not loved half as well as the southern stanzas. 

The world had killed that girl, ripped out her wings and destroying the tune of her songs. The blue sky had been a cage after all, and that was a hard truth to face, a betrayal without culprit, with too many culprits. 

In the haunted castle, monsters walked the halls and sat in thrones. And because there are no true funerals for wolf-ladies this far South, and because men are blind to the things that grow from dead hunted girls, Sansa lived, and learned, and remembered.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 


	3. dark is the water that runs deep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Do not forget that you are powerful. Do not let them make you forget."
> 
>  
> 
> In the end it comes down to a question of practicality. It is the easiest choice she has ever made. That scares her, a little.

 

 

 

 

**ix**

 

 

The righteous king. Righteous, right, true. Robb is a true king, for doing what must be done. His men named him so, and is that not the greatest way to be crowned, supported and trusted?

Was Stannis a true king, then, if simply false for being misliked? He was iron, and loved by the sea, but what was that to the way of things in the capital, where bloody ghosts wandered in the night and murderers strolled in the light of day?

What was that to her? She was Joffrey's hostage, the Lannister's hold on the North. Her loyalties were not with them, no matter what she had to say to survive. Lies were not to be believed by the speaker: that was a danger that she had come to know well. 

Righteous, right. True. Powerful words, to ring out so proudly in the Red Keep's powerful stones. These stones did not forget, and neither did the North.

It had been the heigh of foolishness to think her greatest choice lay in which side to help, to think that it would ever come a time when the right side wasn't her own.

(She misses her family, she does, but with every new spell and mind breached she could not help but wonder if that was the point when she would lose their love. )

The throne room is empty, the guards easy to distract. The wildfire gives off a queer light that passed through the stained glass in beautiful, terrible shapes each shadow lengthened grotesquely. The Iron Throne rose up and up, challenging the ceiling into hidden shapes. Its edges look very sharp and Sansa has the sudden urge to cut herself on them, see if her blood looks different welling up from those blades. She wonders how it would feel, to sit in the great ugly chair her father once sat and unworthy Joffrey warmed every day.

She does neither. Her business with blood has nothing to do with Targaryen curses. Instead, she curtesies deeply, dress sweeping the floor. Her heart beats slowly, too tired to pound in her chest.

"Uncle" she calls. "Grandfather." The Iron Throne devours all the light from the room; two shapes stir from the dark corners of the room, the edges of her awareness. "I have come to learn what I lost and gained in return. As all dead things must."

 

 

 

 

 

**x**

 

 

In the end it comes down to a question of practicality.

The Lannisters she knows. Their dreams are hers, their ambitions uncomplicated. Hers as well, for it is easier to act against her family's enemy than against a non-entity, well meaning but unrelenting. Would Stannis and Renly be more predisposed to send her to her family? Would they let go of such a valuable pawn, honorably and selflessly? Sansa doubts it. Her understanding of bums nature has changed a great deal, and she is not blind to her political position as she once was.

Queen Alysanne had explained it to her.

"You are the key to Winterfell, child." Cool fingers clothed the hair down her back, there but not. "They will want you close, to marry to one of their own, I imagine."

"I will never marry a lion." She had sworn in the dark room, frowning at the pale moonlight reflecting off the vanity.

"I hope you do not have to.But do not forget your position, Sansa Stark. Hostage you may be, but in your mind," A breath, the whisper of a breath on her forehead: a motherly kiss, "you are the wolf in sheep's clothing. You mark the difference between defeat and victory. Do not forget that you are powerful. Do not let them make you forget."

 

 

In the end it comes down to a question of practicality. It is the easiest choice she has ever made. That scares her, a little.

 

 

It had been so long since Sansa had stepped foot upon a sept. It feels like a betrayal, for all that she had once preferred her mother's gods to her father's. Now when she walks towards the Sept of Baelor she can hear the fears and prayers of every person inside, and her marrow chilled down in her bones when she stopped over the spot where--.

"Steady, lass." Lady Queen Betha Blackwood croons, her presence a too-quiet spot at her shoulder. "Steady now."

When she sits down it in the pew it is difficult to settle down. The statues seemed to be looking down on her knowingly, ready to come to life and lift her up. Fraud! they'd call. Cloackturner, blood of the northern, gods-touched! Leave, be gone!

But the stone remains stone, and stone gods have no hold on her. Only the ones of bark and dreams. My gods are older than these, of the green forgotten places.

The singing is terribly loud, as is the tolling of bells, but fear makes every mind louder, restless. Already hundreds beg for protection from the Smith, mercy from the Maiden, wisdom from the Crone. Sansa joins her voice with theirs, high, higher, even as she makes her mind a quiet needlepoint. Let me be a bird, jumping from branch to mind, she prays to no one in particular. Whoever hears, if they care to help.

The hubbub of the city is a clamoring right now. She strives beyond the women and children, elders and infirms, the very free guards remaining. The soldiers fill the riverbank with fear, both riverbanks. Dozens of hundreds and more of them there are, and most of them strangers to a sword's grasp, the heat of battle. They hate the wait and they will hate the bloodshed even more. So many of them will not live to see the dusk, she knows, much less the dawn.

Beyond their terror she goes, above and beyond, like a bird swooping for prey. There.

After months of captivity Sansa is a master at this. She prepared, as well. Spied every day in every war meeting through different eyes. She knows about how Stannis is the greatest naval commander alive, how Renly's men outnumber all the people King's Landing. She knows about the chain, and it doesn't take long for her to know measures aren't being taken to properly defeat it.

The mind that tells her this is from one of Stannis' captains, Davos Seaworth. He is unshakably loyal to his king, and through his mind she can start to guess why. He thinks in terms of shorelines, the way farmers think of harvests and seasons. The sea is the world, himself and his ideals, his believes make for a ragged ship and crew. His family are the far shore, distant but longed for, and in his eyes Stannis is the richest port, the one with the riskiest shoals and cruelest storms, the one with the truest reward. He will defend these shore to the last strength, and not regret it for a moment.

Sansa has tried to enter Stannis Baratheon's mind. It was like trying to pick apart flat iron, engraved in shapes she could not understand. This was a new perspective. It painted Stannis as honorable as Ned Stark, braver than Robert Baratheon, more just than the Smith.

She very much doubts that is the truth of the man, but she quite likes Ser Davos. She hopes he lives, or at least some of his son's do.

Withdrawing from his mind, she stops for a moment before going to work properly.

 

  
At no point had Sansa considered passing the battle without helping. Not now, that she could, not when she knew every person, peasant or lord, thought and lived like the others. They were all a little foul, a little kind, but few were truly horrible. They did not deserve to die.

They would die regardless, but they would have her help doing so, and perhaps that would be enough for some of them.

 

 

Making someone do something is very different than making them not do something.

Suggestions are easy. Invoking compassion where it would usually not be enough to act upon, implanting the thought that it might be a good idea to give some more coins to the poor. Turn away, focus on the tapestry, say something distracting to the King. This she had learned to do in the Red Keep, among the most feeble-minded lords.

Feelings too she can share, calm and rage and fear, loneliness, but those are harder. She has to enter their minds more fully for that, and feel what they feel to a greater degree, to understand and supplant the original feelings. It is arduous, often painful. She has to have them before giving them, creating and then cutting away a little part of herself in the process.

Making people do something truly contrary to their wishes is another matter. You have to dig in, scout their nature, to see which threads are fraying, which one to pull and weave. It is a fight between she the invader and they the invaded, one that must never be noticed.

What she does during the battle is all that and nothing like it.

To a young soldier with soiled underclothes she says be strong be brave come on don't falter. To the old men with cobbled knees she sends strength, and peace to face the end. To the unknowing widow she sends comfort, the smell of husband's hair. Every time she can, she avoids blows. Let them be clumsy, let them be weak and useless and unharmed, she thinks, fervently thwarting strikes, dodging blows and stiffening limbs, let me save at least a few, a few.

Her knights, the ruffians she tried her first spell on, fight bravely. They would have always fought bravely, for they are fond of life and disinclined to die quietly, but under her words they go on to fight for the people of the city. Their deaths are painful but rife with meaning.

(are they? was sansa stark truly the judge of these souls, to send them to their death so blithely?

her father had always said that the men who said the sentence should swing the sword. had there been a difference in what she had done between saying the sentence snd swinging the sword? she had given them a task, too subtle to be denied.

did that maker her a lady or a murderer? )

And through it all she feels every blow scored against her vessel, every fear and kernel of anger. The first time the man whose mind she occupies dies, everything stops. Her conscience flutters, untethered, before returning violently to her body. Her eyes, blurred, catch a swarm of bodies, pristine marble, and her nose itches with the incense.

She falls to the seat, harshly. Shaking, heart trembling. It is worse than pain. It is an absence, a lost space she can no longer touch, no longer exists. It is death, and yet she lives still.

I live. I live I live I live.

The songs go on. One hymn for each stone god. How can the songs go one when the boy Nikol died?

This is life. The dead die and the living sing on, praising useless stone gods.

Sansa shakes. Her heart trembles, so fast, so afraid. If it was pierced in that moment, she would live on. Like a song, she would never die, passing from mind to mind. Less then a god, more than a ghost.

The first notes of Mother's Mercy swells through the sept. Sansa returns to the fray, slow and unafraid.

 

 

 

 

**xi**

 

 

  
Harrenhal was a castle of ghosts. Weasel hasn't seen any so far, but sometimes she could have sworn there are words in the wind, old far-away words. If she'd paid more attention to her lessons with Maester Luwin she would have know her grandmother's people had been Whents from Harrenhal, but as it was she knew only the tale of Balerion's wrath. It was much more to her taste.

(there was also the tale of --- black arts, but luwin was a maester of the Citadel, taught to despise magic. he did not teach her that one.)

Weasel knew no Maesters, anyway. Weasel was a war orphan who cleaned and served for a few moldy pieces of bread and brown stew. The great castle was like a great black forest, and she knew forests, how to live and survive and hide in them. Weasel was a weasel, a plotting little rodent.

(this was wrong. she was fast like a , strong as a wolverine. she was a wolf and her name wasn't really weasel. every night she had wild dreams, and every night she feasted on lannister flesh

but that was a secret, so she tried not to think on it.)

There was nothing special about Weasel except that she liked to fancy herself the ghost of Harrenhal. The wind whispered through the lending towers, invisible to the eye, but Weasel liked to think she could see shapes in the air, and hear the words in the wind.

Sometimes she could have sworn she heard her secret name. Arya, Arya, hissed the eastern wind that's your name. Arya, Arya, hummed the western breeze, Arya skin-changer, Arya sister Arya. Arya, Arya, from the south, Arya don't forget the pack

Arya, sang the northern wind, Arya I am sorry. Arya I am coming.

"Don't be stupid," she grumbles. "The only thing coming this way is winter."

 

 

 

The Queen has the ladies barred in a room with jars of wine and a headsman. Sansa is bitter from being distracted. It had been her intention to sneak away to the godswood, there where her powers were greater, to continue helping the soldiers. But Queen Cersei had wished otherwise; her orders are nothing to a hostage's piety.

She speaks of the last time the city was under attack, of the bloodletting and horrors of victory. Sansa listens (Anai's father was one of those cruel soldiers. Mitrai had the scars still, the night terrors. Sansa has been victim more than once, when dream-walking. so many of those nightmares were similar, in so many people) and sees how Cersei chugs down goblet after goblet, for all that her words are clipped and cold.

"Drink." The Queen insists. " Drink, little bird. Wine helps."

She does, only because of the way her mind shies from memories of her marriage. Not a big sip. She needs to be clearheaded, if it comes to that.

And besides. Ilin Payne is les I got by the door, Ice in his unworthy hands. If she made them look away like she had done when talking to Uncle Brandon, if she made him forget, think it had been displaced perhaps...

"Do you have any notion what happens when a city is sacked, Sansa? No, you wouldn't, would you? All you know of life you learned from singers, and there's such a dearth of good sacking songs."

"True knights would never harm women and children." She says quietly.

"No doubt you're right. So why don't you just eat your broth like a good girl and wait for Symeon Star-Eyes and Prince Aemon the Dragonknight to come rescue you, sweetling. I'm sure it won't be very long now."

Sansa looks down and presses her lips together. Uncle Brandon laughs outright, more of a bark than a chuckle. Standing tall by then window, Ser Aemon quirks a thin smile.

"I cannot speak for Symeon, my lady, but I have little intention of leaving you alone." He gave the Queen a scornful look He had little regard for Cersei, whom he taught a poor substitute to Naerys.

He is utterly charming in his protection and Sansa smiles wanly, blushes. Her new friends were very strange: it had been Arya of the two of them who more easily made connections among the unlikely, but here Sansa was, a witch in the nest of vipers befriending ghosts. Most of them were utterly different than she had thought them to be, often to dissapointing results, but others like Ser Aemon were even better than the stories, for they were people on truth, or what was left of people, and she had come to conclude that opinionated friends were preferable to faultless heroes

Cersei is speaking but suddenly she cannot hear a word over the roaring in her ears. Sansa's lips whiten. Her nostrils flare. Her vision is over-imposed with a great curtain of flaming green, hot enough to make her cheeks hurt.

"If you are going to throw up, do not do it in front of me." Cersei's cool voice ripples through her horror. Her lips are stained red. Otherwise she is the perfect Queen, golden and great. But never good. Hundreds dead in a flash of cursed fire, and for what? Wine and jewels, stolen swords and long titles.

Sansa lets herself loathe her so much, before breathing out and smiling, wan as a autumn moon.

"I am well, thank you. Your Grace is very kind to care for my dignity."

She raises the goblet to her, a neat toast, and drinks it dry. She can already imagine Joffrey's speech, Joffrey the craven kitten.

 _Rejoice, for we have won. Stannis Baratheon's forces are ash in the wind. Rejoice! The True King sits upon the Iron Throne._ The idea make her gut churn.

 

 

 

 

 

**xii**

 

 

 

Her room is shrouded in dark light, green tinting the corner of the bed, reflecting off her bed. The Hound's face, twisted in its permanent snarl, seemed to absorb all the darkness in the room.

His eyes shone in the green fire. The dirk pressed to her neck was a cold line against her skin, gentle in its sharpness. Even drunk Sandor Clegane was a master of the blade, knew just how much to press before breaking flesh.

"Sansa. Hold very still now." Uncle Brandon cautions. His see-through eyes look sharper in the gloom, made crueler by rage. She wants to tell him not to worry, that Ser Sandor is only a scared, drunk man, but the knife catches her breath and she lets the silence last.

"Sing, little bird." Sandor Clegane demands, never knowing the Dragonknight has a moonlight-and-shadow sword to his chest. "Sing or I'll kill you."

Sansa is not scared. The knife is uncomfortable, and she is ill, sick and clammy with the pain of thousands crowding at the edges of her awareness. It dulls her, makes her chest depthless and her feelings shallow. When she sings her voice does not crack one bit.

"The septons preach about the seven hells. What do they know? Only a man who's been burned knows what hell is truly like"

 _I have been burned_ , she realizes. _Only I do not have the scars to show for it_. That made her feel sadder for him. She clasps his shoulder. The contact makes her mind press closer to his, makes her skirt the edges of a awareness that is like a bonfire gone mad. What an angry, scorched mind. What a sad lonely man. All the peace she can give him will on,y be temporary.

"He was no true knight," she whispered to him. Her words ring in the quiet, undeniably true. She doesn't look at Uncle Brandon, Ser Aemon, any of the specters crowding her room. This is for Sandor the boy, Sandor the man. "He was not."

 _I will make certain there will be no more false knight_ s, she promises. It's a silent vow, echoing in her mind, settling deep. _No more Gregors, no more Joffreys. There are no true Knights and no rightful king's but there is one wolf-witch, and I remember._

 

 


	4. the learning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many many thanks to everyone who read, left a kudos and commented. Seriously, you are amazing and make me so happy. Special thanks to TheFanficExperience, who honored me with a rec in her wonderful tumblr. Go check them out!

 

 

 

 

 

**viii**

 

 

 

Sansa is dreaming.

Her feet are paws and she is lead by a nose towards a snuffling rat, and that is how she knows she is dreaming. Awake she never feels that hungry. The cat-that-is-her hides and she runs towards it, runs until its sounds are very far away, and she is all alone in a dark empty courtyard.

She wakes up . The feeling of she dog one skin to return to her own is disquieting, leaves her disconnected for a few moments. When she regain her wits she stared around, scooting back in her pillows.

"I didn't want to marry him, you know." The stranger says. "I was a princess already, after all, and I wanted to see the world. In the end I never even crossed the Shivering Sea."

Sansa grips her sheets, eyes straining in the dark. Her room seem very small, the windows closed to block the terrible scorched smell that had swallowed the city whole. Hours of training had her willing a small candle to light, casting long shadows.

The strange woman is sitting in Sansa's lone armchair, figure clad in the dark tones she has come to recognize as ghostly blood. Her face is turned to the window, towards the cloud of smoke covering the river. But her voice is low and pleasant, with the cadence of one telling a story to a child.

"We were never in love, it must be known. I loved him, after a fashion, and he had a certain fondness for me, which was quite well enough. We had children together, and there was some amount of friendship between us, at first. Before he got too lost in his dreams to care for the waking hours."

Then the woman turned to her, and her face was dark, made darker by blood and terrible wounds. Her eyes were very clear and very bright, looking at Sansa calmly.

"Do not lose yourself to dreams, child. Madness begins when you start losing your self to shadows of thoughts."

And Sansa shivers awake, breath catching in her throat. There is no one else in her room, dead or longing, and he dreams crowd again her eyes, pressing close Ina mangled whole. Her hands grasp at the wall, press against the bricks, and she keeps her eyes open long before dawn breaks.

 

 

  
"I could have sworn 'twas Maegor's damned screeching that woke the servants." Uncle Brandon says while she eats her sausages. The room is not so threatening in the morning, light like egg yolks passing through the clouds. It passes thought her Uncle as well, blurring his features into dangerous soft slopes. "And he wasn't the only one. There are more of us now, naturally, but even the old ones are rousing themselves at the wrong times. They are restless."

"You are always restless." Ser Aemon retorts, giving Brandon a wry look. They had built some sort of friendship between the two of them, mostly based on exchanging quips and poor jests. Sansa is too kind to tell them they are not nearly as amusing as they think. And too grateful. She knows their worry at her listless silences, pale drawn-out days.

She lets them bicker for a time. Looking down, she focuses on her silver spoon, crooking her finger. The spoon twitches once, twice, rises from the plate with a slow ascent. Sansa barely let herself breathe, but for every loss of since traction it fell. Soon it kept rising and she grew braver, making it spin in the air and jump over the lemon water glass.

It is only when they started mentioning old lovers in greater detail than she is interested in that she lets it fall into the bowl with a contained clank.

"I think I spoke with Princess Elia."

"Did you?" Ser Aemon frowns. "It must have been the battle that stirred her awake. She is not one to often walk among us." He explains at her surprised look. "In truth she does not speak with any of us but Lady Betha, I believe. Little holds her interest but justice for her ills, and that is hard to come by as a spirit."

"Sansa." Uncle Brandon is serious, more serious than she had heard him before. It warms her, for fear is now warmth to her. "Elia has no kindness towards our House. Take care with her. Revenge has been in her heart since her death." The terrible nothingness where his neck had once been gave a glimpse of ghostly bones. "Especially since that cat walks these walls again."

He need not say a name. Tywin Lannister's thoughts are sharp and encompassing, like the long slope of a sword's blade, and his steps echo in the castle, heavier than a man's ought be. A prowling lion at all times, even when he stood still. The ghosts did not like that, either, not at all.

An apple flies to her hand and she encloses her fingers around it half-mindedly. Sansa takes a bite with a small smile. "I shall be careful, Uncle."

He smiles down at her with her own expression as she savors the overripe sweetness. Juice drips down her chin and she has the childish urge to lick it clean, like a pup cleaning itself. Like Lady had, once.

Her closed drapes fluttered and Sansa wondered if justice and revenge tasted so much when it came to lions, was there any difference?

 

 

  
It is not altogether similar to losing her father, but yet she finds little of it differs. It is more alike that never ending moment she realized she had lost her home, but that is not right either. The flayed man sigil of the Bolton's comes to mind. That is how Sansa feels: like her skin has been ripped off one too many times. She feels cold, colder than even on that night the trees spoke to her. Winter has made a home in her breast, her numb fingers, built a castle out of glass-frost thick enough to hold the worst of the despair at bay, but only just.

So she has the windows closed to the smoke and the ash, the glimpses of shades she sees the for a shirt moment after she closes her eyes. Her head aches constantly, every heartbeat a painful drum. And the voice, the shouts and whispers and cries, they are nothing to the spots that continue silent. A vacancy she had not known she would miss, would notice.

War is not a boardgame. It is the many dying and suffering for the few. Sansa would pay anything to not know this truth.

Tis but a different way of grieving. It does not see as if it will ever truly pass. She has visitors often, yet their presence grates as it did not before, an ache in the raw wounds of the battle. Most of them leave her alone, thought Uncle Brandon wanders by sometimes and keeps guard by her door in snatches, for as long as he can stand to be still.

Princess Elia comes by every night, only after dusk. Her presence is still, soft as sand but never grating. She says nothing, only sits by her side. It is solace, of a sort. Sympathy and symmetry. Sansa is a dead hostage now as well, dead too many times to count and living still, living always.

 

 

On the third day after the battle she rouses from her room. The widest window this part of the keep stares out down Aegon's High Hill, and there she stands early in the morning, when only servants and spirits stir.

The Tyrells of the Reach walk through the city gates, petals and pennants fluttering in their wake.

That day she starts her lessons in earnest.

 

 

 

 

  
**ix**

 

 

 

The lords cry out: _give us Margaery, no traitor queen, no traitor wolf!_ Their minds cry out: _give us bread, give us peace, no more danger at our doors!_

Joffrey is almosy kingly as he confers honors and titles to the Tyrells. His grandfather (twice over, there is no doubt at all of that anymore. If Sansa were a different person she might have found more peace in knowing that her father was no traitor at all, but as it is it only makes her angrier, hungrier) stands tall at his side, only a step removed from kingly power, and oversees all with cold cat eyes.

Heart in her throat, hands clenching the wooden railing, she listens to Jiffrey proclaim their betrothal broken.

She ought to be happy. Relieved, and pitying of Margaery Tyrell, who will bear the King's bruises and babies. She is nothing of the sort: her hands let go of the railing, one finger at a time. Her face is properly distraught, as the mummery needs it to be. She watched the parade of nobles, smug Baelish and brutes from the Westerlands. She scoured the chamber's with her eyes, but only Ser Aemon was to be seen, giving disgusted looks at the new-made knights. She thought she glimpsed tall Quenn Alysanne in the crowd, but it was not a sure thing.

One knight, this one a captive from Stannis' army, cried out his defiance. "Joffrey is the black worm eating the heart of the realm! Darkness was his father, and death his mother! Destroy him before he corrupts you all! Save yourselves!"

Joffrey stirred from his boredom and called out for the man to be killed. In the movement his flesh was rendered by the throne, bleeding red. Redder still bled the knight, at the sharp end of Trant's sword.

It is almost enough for her to miss Littlefinger's plotting. Almost, but not quite.

The knight's words ring out in her head long after he is cold and still, rattle like coins.

 

 

 

There is a girl kneeling by an old tree, a girl with hair the color of the leaves. The ground is wet with growing dew, grass swaying under the weight of a night breeze.

Beside her sits a ghost.

"You have asked your forefathers for knowledge. Have they been of much use?"

The Queen -- Lady Betha, if you must, she had said, there are so many queens crowding the Red Keep already.--is a presence of mist and faint winter cold siting by her side. She would not ask her to leave, of course, bug in truth she had been hoping for some solitude. Not quiet, thought she missed it dreadfully. These days her mind left her no chance for true quiet.

That is why she is here, after all.

Sansa sighs. "Not very. Oh, Uncle Brandon ais kind enough." She assures at the ladies look. She had gathered the two of them did not get along very well, and was not keen to start another tiff among phantoms. "As kind as he knows to be, I believe."

"As sensible as the Wall, then, and about as conforming." Lady Betha says. She has a strange way to speak, blunt without causing insult. Sansa does not understand it. "Regardless, he has the wolf blood and so is blind to the ways of the trees. And your grandfather?"

She looks down, red in the face. "He will not speak to me. I hoped for his guidance during the battle. I thought the call of the --" the bloodbath, the massacre, the deaths deaths deaths--"fighting might make him listen. But he did not come."

"You scare him." Lady Betha says, and it startles her enough that her knee slides into the mud. The lady's face crinkles, making her seem older than she was when she died. "He would be most cross to hear it, but never mind that. Tis the truth. Do you think you hold power over the living only? You are a Stark, girl, the like of which hasn't drawn breath since Cregan's sister, Igna who officiated the Pact of Ice and Fire. And even her had not the potential you carry around like a maiden's cloak. Did you truly not know? "

"No." She confesses, confusion clouding her features. And fear, also, for she had never wished for this powers, and yet now she could not imagine being without them. "The Pact of Ice and Fire?"

Lady Betha looks at her askance. Then she laughs, a loud raven's cackle. Two robins scatter and not for the first time Sansa wonders if animals saw or heard more of the world than humans. "Oh, that's rich! No wonder Rickard has been avoiding you."

Sansa waits for the Lady Betha to stop chuckling. Her firsts do not clench in frustration only because she wills them not to.

"Sansa." She says in time, softer and somber now. "What do you know of your lines' marriages?"

"Everything." Sansa answers promptly. Lady Betha laughs, this time lower. Her eyes crinkle, bunching her forehead. It is easy to see the mother in her like that.

"I am not surprised." She is kind enough not to mention Sansa's proud flush. "A better question, then. Thousands have lived and died in these walls. Why do you think there are so few ghosts in the Keep?"

"They wish to live more than the others." She says, but even as she speaks she knows that is not right. She cannot imagine her father had not wanted to live desperately more than little Jaehaera.

"No. Think."

Sansa thinks. Stares at the canopy, considering. In the silence her body throbs, alive, and the ground beneath her rings a similar tune.

The Red Keep had buckled into itself when Tywin Lannister crossed its threshold again. Varys walked and his steps were nothing, less than nothing. Sansa herself left the stone colder than before she touched it, colder and more awake. Her blood and tears had called to her grandfather's own suffering, the spirit of him forever captive in those pink stones.

"Places." She speaks slowly. Her words fall into the wood like rain, deliberate and chilling. "Places recall."

"They do." Lady Betha agrees. "And they do not. You are not wrong, exactly, nor are you right. You see, Lady Sansa, some people die begging to live on, for one more day, and those stay dead as dead can be. But some, the strong and the stubborn and the strange, they crave to be remembered."

There is quiet. The Lady holds her hand, touched her with white hands, red nails, fat fingers. The ravens of Raventree Hall are always fat and red and black. They had not forgotten the funerals of old.

"Your father cherished life more than the pale mockery of it. That takes sense, and wisdom. He was not afraid for his own sake, and so his bravery was of a different sort than that of phantom. Do not despair, child. He did not, for he knew you might be well."

Sansa cries.

 

 

  
Lady Betha had left her by the time Ser Dontos comes. He finds her kneeling by the weirwood tree, hands cupped. There is a little lagoon in the crook of her fingers, a dripping salt pool.

"Come, dear lady, don't dirty yourself in the mud." He chided her. Sansa does not turn around. Her eyes are closed, cheeks dry.

"I am praying, Ser." His mind is weak and malleable, made soft by alcoholic vapors and little nerve. Easy to scan for motives, easy to scam and redirect. He will not remember this conversation, only a watercolor painting of it, with kisses and warnings and the heady anticipation for undeserved rewards.

"I have brought a gift to you."

"I know. Would you like to crown me?"

He smiles, thinking it a jest. The spiderweb of spun-silver settles over her head with all the weight of a breeze, a phantom's touch. His hands linger in her hair.

"There. A magic crown for the lady."

Sansa turns around. Her eyes are very red and very clear, the color of home bound rivers. "No, Ser." She corrects him gently. "A magic crown for the princess."

  
She has the tears join the poison in the pretty amethysts. From Assai, Dontos says, black and rare. They are all the rarer now.

As a child she used to swim in Winterfell's hot pools, jump with her siblings and wage war with little waves and shoves. She had been a little girl then, not knowing the strangeness of salty pools kept hot in the winter lands.

That was then. Sansa was a witch-woman now. She did not need her grandfather to tell her tears had power, that blood was a treasure and a curse.

 

 

 

  
After the festivities of the day, the throne room is eery in the lone torchlight. Sansa walks inside cautiously, keeping to the shadows. It is not very difficult to keep the servants away, but in this place she is careful with her powers, for all that she has used them before and well. The Iron Throne is a grey giant, all hungry blades and sharp edges. If she focuses on it she can see the places where the swords melded together into one single atrocity, the points magic touched. Dragon magic, fire magic. It does not like her touch. She misliked it as well, how it refuses to cool under her hand as all else does.

Yet she is not there to freeze it. The blade that had pierced the king's arm was still ruddy with blood, and it is a matter of calling forth the blood. It is not the same as wine or tears, and she has to fight for every drop, but in time it rises in the air to meet the open poison stones.

 

 

 

 

  
**xi**

 

 

  
That night is a crescent moon, but the one after grows black and dotted with stars, no moon to keep the death at bay. She has a question for her visitor.

"Is that why Prince Rhaegar is not here? Was he not strong enough to remain?"

"He was certainly strange enough." Princess Elia quips. As the days went on and wounds of the mind healed they had taken to speaking some, quietly. The Princess is kind and charming and surprisingly, devastatingly witty. Sansa hadn't recognized the sound as her own when she first made her laugh.

"But no, he does not haunt these walls. There is word of a new ghost stalking the skeleton go Summerhall, however, a silver phantom with sweet songs. I have long suspected that is him."

Sansa blinks, straightening. "How can the dead wander from the place of their death?" If that was possible she did not doubt her nuncle and grandfather would be prowling the crypts of Winterfell. But then again, she was not certain what had been done with their bones.

"Rhaegar died in the Trident. It is the nature of rivers to bring the dead to their true destination. Rhaegar was born on the night of the Tragedy of Summerhall, and had long wished to haunt those walls.He haunted them long before his death."

Elia's face becomes wan and far away. Sansa struggles not to look at the rest of her, the battering tears the lion's men had left on her. She keeps quiet out of respect, but her curiosity overflows sooner than is strictly polite.

"Do rivers truly do that?"

"Oh, yes." Elia returns from her memories. Her small grin changes into a smirk. "The First Men of the Riverlands had some notions about that. Lady Betha will tell you their is the only sensible notion."

"Do you disagree, my lady?" Sansa asks, leaning forward. Princess Elia is a study in sadness, or she seems to be one so well that it hides the nature of her haunting. Yet she had said in that first night that her malevolent intents were not towards Sansa, and she had not known her to lie. Lady Betha had confessed to being unsure if the dead could even lie to Sansa.

"I have found that the Valyrian's costume of cremation ties in with older ways shared by the Rhoynar and the First Men. You might wish to ask your grandfather about that."

Abruptly, the Princess rises to her feet; the dark night is blushing grey, and their times has grown short. Farewells and curtsies are shared to before she vanishes.

To the empty room Sansa whispers, "I will."

 

  
She does. There is a spot of the godswood, where the oaks crowd together in a browning battalion. It is positioned on a slope, so that it sides higher than the ground around it, and if one finds a breach in the woods the river can be seen, slugging slow with bodies. That is where she finds him, on a moonless autumn afternoon, when the sky almost makes the wreckage pretty. 

Ash flurries around them. Sansa thinks of it, holds that thought close and imagines the ash swirling around her without touching. Sooner than she expected she finder herself the eye of a storm, grey cloack turning grayer. Sansa turns on her heels I time to the wind, a dance where she keeps the rythm, and adds to the ash with red leaves and dead grass, sand and seeds.

He watches her giggling like a child until all the leaves had flown away from her grasp and there is nothing more to play with. He lets her regain her breath, without ever speaking, until she makes her questions. Perhaps he knows his silence reminds her of another silence, the safety of a quiet man that watched her play in happier days, and sometimes played with her. 

In this as well he is the father of the quiet wolf. 

 She asks her grandfather then, only this one time, why she never dreamt of Lady anymore. He looks at her, skin forever frozen in abhorrent blisters, and smiles. His smile is like the one she sees in the mirror, the one Brandon gives her. It is only on her grandfather's face that she realizes it is the smile of the Starks of old, the ones that waged war on giants and trees and men alike.

"You should know better by now." he chides ", that the true skin taken off can never regrow again."

"Then teach me to grow wings and fur, grand sire." She asks, challenges, orders. _You cannot lie to me. We both know that you cannot lie. I do not want to find out if you can disobey_. "Show me how to change shape and work the world to my will, so I may grow. I am not your servant, but your granddaughter. The legacy you carried is mine more than it ever was yours. Tell me of it."

And Rickard Stark tells her.

 

 

  
**xi**

 

  
"Why me?"

"You did as I did, child, held southern ambitions close to me chest. We forgot, and so we were made to remember. Like all the rivers run their course, as winter follows spring, so does the Night follow the Day. This is why: the Pact of Ice and Fire has been completed. There would be a time when a wolf and a dragon would have to come together. Your Aunt, my Lyanna knew that, as Igna Peacemaker did once. The North would not content to be chained if it did not have the chance of freedom one day.

You are the captive given wings, Sansa. You are what the North forgot, and the North calls you home. Can't you hear the trees singing?"


	5. cold the stillness of the southern river

 

 

 

 

 

**xii**

 

 

"Colder." Grandfather orders.

"Colder." Queen Alysanne advises.

"Colder." Uncle Brandon repeats mockingly.

The water stirs, ripples fighting against the tide. Almost-frost reflects the starlight above, thin enough to let it pass through to the riverbed. It turns cold, colder, until not a beam of light passed through. All at once the tide called and the ice broke in shards, melting quickly. When she bends to touch it shrinks in her hold, even though her hands are colder than any other living person's.

A noise of frustration escapes her before she can hold it back. She smooths her wayward hair and sweaty cheeks with an already sopped handkerchief. Sitting down in the nearest driftwood, she sighs, aching. She doesn't even mind that it dirties her cloak.

A jeweled hand touches her shoulder, looking nearly solid in the moonlight. Ghosts are always more powerful on dark night, but Alysanne Targaryen is an old force of nature by now. "Come now, Princess. Do not lose heart."

Sansa has no desire of appearing weak in front of the Good Queen, whom she admires above all the other dead of the Keep, but it is hard not to let her head hang down.

"It is no use, my lady. The water does not like me." She confesses in a small voice.

'Tis true. Sansa can lift cutlery and twist the winds, make stone cold and light little wax-less flames, but water refuses to bend to her wishes. It is demoralizing, especially since she had counted on the ice of her father's blood and rivers of her mother's line to make it as easy as the rest of it was, which is to say, exhausting but rewarding.

This night, as the last seven before, she had devoted to yielding ice. The previous attempts had gone so badly that even Queen Alysanne, known for preferring the company of the older wraiths dwelling deep in the Keep.

"It does not meet to like you, only to obey you." Uncle Brandon says, but Queen Alysanne gives him a harsh look and he turns away with a huff. The Good Queen turns to her, smoothing her wayward hair.

"Remember your sowing lessens, when first your stitches were crooked." Sansa does, though it had been a long time ago. "What did you do when you failed then?"

Sansa sighs through her nose. "I unwound the yarn and tried again."

The Queen nods. Sansa gets up, streghtens her knees and rolllsup her waterlogged sleeves.

"Again," she whispers to herself, "colder."

 

 

 

 

  
**xiii**

 

 

"They are not to be trusted." Lady Betha warns her. "Prickly they are, and insidious. Never trust a rose that does not show its thorns, and the Tyrells are the very best at hiding thorns."

"You need not worry so, my lady." She begs the old queen. The ivory teeth of her comb pass through her tresses without finding knots, path unhindered and slow.. "I am not a foolish child anymore."

"There is not fault in placing trust in the trustworthy, or childishness in a child." She argues, but Sansa does not hear. Her ears are full with the sounds of conspiracy and change, change.

 

  
Ser Loras comes to her room, a star among men in his white garb. Sansa flushes and trips over her own tongue, off in truth he is even more beautiful than before. It is enough to distract her from making sure he remembered the rose he had given once.

Nervous, she dares peek to see what he thinks of her, and is sorely dissapointed in what she finds. His mind is much like a garden, lovely and colorful, but when she tried to touch the flowers they turned to dust. And in any case, it was mortifying to realize he had no interest in her: for at the center of his garden was one great pinewood, slim trunk covered in vines. The tree is dead and the vines a poisonous black, and its canopy casts darkness in the whole garden.

He thinks her a foolish child and she thinks him a foolish boy and nothing of it shines through the way they conduct themselves. It is a pretty enough dance.  _He is nothing like I thought he was,_ she thinks, and that is an oddly invigorating thought among the disappointment. It is humbling, to realize she does not know everything, that there are people and lives beyond the Red Keep and the city it reigns over. 

How could she be dissapointed, meeting the Lady Margaery? For if her face is sweet and her manner gentle, her mind is a lovelier garden than her brother's, her thoughts smooth and pointed. Sansa likes her at once, and is very sad not to be able to trust her.

Unlike Lady Betha, the Queen of Thorns is more than blunt. Her manners are rude, amusing and perilous all at once, but it is her thoughts that show the truth of her mocking title. Thorn-sharp, they sting Sansa at the touch of their minds, and for a terrible moment she fears the lady had known of her intrusion. Thankfully that is not so, for if that were the case Sansa might have to face an enemy at was, like the Silent War between greenseers and the Children Grandfather had been telling her about. She would prefer to remain in ignorance of the odds between herself and Olenna Tyrell.

The old lady reminds her she once knew her grandfather, and that alone has her stopping herself from laughing.

"You mock me now, but that woman made a night terror of my visit to Oldtown." He grumbled. She would have preferred not to be escorted everywhere by invisible keepers, or if so she would have preferred if it had been Ser Aemon or Lady Betha, and most of all Princess Elia, but her grandfather was apparently far too invested in their lessons to leave her alone. She suspected he might be lonely.

Lady Olenna's mouth asks for the truth about Joffrey. Her mind is already jumping to Littlefinger's proposition, the net I'm Sansa's cupboard, how pleasant it would be to have the stepping stone to the North made fat with Willas' scholarly seed.

Sansa flushes unflatteringly and stutters the truth with a tongue that sings as sweet a tune as the Queen of Thorns. Her grudge with Joffrey goes farther than greed, than bruises and beheadings. She had loved her father, her home and childhood, but us greatest crime had been taking her Lady from her. He would die for that. His fate had been decided that right on the day of her flowering, when the things that lived in the trees whispered to her, and hers with his.

Joffrey would die, and it would not be the Queen of Thorns to fell him. This is a dangerous game, and she a novice, but Sansa Stark is nothing if not a diligent student.

She has done nothing but learn for a long time, now. 

 

  
The Tyrells are lovely and brilliant and their very presence demands that she grows stronger, faster, brighter. It is a relief as much as a bother, to have a new challenge to face now that every day had turned into a permanent struggle against the natural course of the world.

Sansa leaves her bed every morning with a new spring in her step, and falls asleep only at the end of the hour of the wolf.

 

 

 

 

**xiv**

 

 

"Broader." Suggests Prince Aemon.

"Broader." Remarks Lady Betha

Broader, broader." Sings little Jaehaera.

   
Sansa pants. Arms shaking, knees trembling, she twists her elbows at a steadier angle and turns her palms out. the water responds, turning over itself in a thiner ribbon as she wills it to rise higher. It does, one hand's length, another, in a curling motion, until her arms tremble from the shoilder to the wrists. The water shimmers, shakes; Sansa panics and thinks of ice, frozen rivers.

The spire of frost holds for a moment before her hands hobble and it cracks, raining down melting hail.

Sansa tries again, with broader thought and a firmer stance. Like a warrior holding a sword, or a spear, or a dancer holding a ribbon, or the wind, or nothing like it. This was water, and it did not like her, but it understood her. They were both running, homeless mysteries of natures

She fails, and tries again, and after that again. The moon waxes and wans and widens above her, smiles glinting off the turning river like light from steel.

 

 

  
One day Margaery takes her hawking. They go to a place of the godswood Sansa knows but not well. It is the first time she had ridden since the mob, and the memory makes her feel hollowed out. It feels as if she lost something that day, gained more, and see cannot find it in herself to regret it.

A fox scurries in the underbrush. The slant of its mind is not unlike Margaery's.

Margaery's hair shines warm in the sunlight. It's a cloudy day, just windy enough to redden their cheeks. Yet the sun falls stronger here than it ever does high in her room, turning the world in forgotten shades of green and rich brown, blue and white. Even nature knew the battle was over. For now, at least.

Sansa relishes in the cold, the peace of the woods, the way her companion smile turned deadlier and lovelier when her merlin returned with caught prey. Margaery looks up at her with her upturned lips and confidential regard even as the smaller bird struggles in its last moments.

She wishes she could be caught as easily in Margaery's tokens, her soft-smelling promises. For all her sqemes, there is a measure in kindness in her, and she does like Sansa, this rose of - girl, in the manner roses love. Capricious and biting and gracious, graceful. Sansa fells small and too large, forever at the risk of walking too far into the rose garden.

I could leave, she realizes then. The thought is like cold air in her lungs, stinging and swelling. Margaery was distracted, the guards slow from bread and cold meat. It would be easy to divert their attention. Ser Aemon kept his distance, standing still sentinel in the shadows; he would understand, he would. She could make think she had fallen and drowned somehow, or wandered and captured by some vagrant survivor from the battle. Margaery would weep and Joffrey would rage to lose his worn plaything. As long as she kept to the river and kept an eye on the stars she was bound to walk North.

The idea makes her half-wild with longing.

She remember Elinor and Megga giggling about knights, their songs and pretty titters. Beside her Margaery smooths her Merlin's feathers with detached affection, filling the space around her in relief with everything else, like only the living can.

 _This cannot ever be mine. I am a wolf, not a rose. Remember Lady,_ she tells herself, and the memory is enough to seep her heart out of the last summer sun-warmth. 

She turns her back to the city and stares out at the forest, eyes stinging.

 

 

 

"Do you truly not want a guard? I am sure Gwain would be good company."

Sansa shakes her head at Margaery's offer. "Thank you, but I wish only to pray for a while in solitude."

Margaery is not pleased by this, she can tell, and her worry is well meant, but she acquiciences. She nods from stop her lovely stallion and flick her reins. Sansa stands there for a moment, the tolling of the bells ringing out over the city from the courtyard.

She crosses the threshold of Baelor's Great Sept slowly. There is a memory of desperation here, but faith as well. Som kneel in front of statues, others in the pews bow their heads. She can hear their prayers as clear as thought: let this babe live, please, bring my son safe from the sea, bring me joy, bring me safety.

She tries to focus on the statues, but pretty as they are, they are only stone and ivory. if there are seven gods, they do not have ears in the stone, like the old ones have in the trees.

"You remind me of my queen. A little only, but enough."

She smiles, delighted. There was no need to ask which queen was his, and it had ever been Naerys whom Sansa had most emulated as a child, second only to her own lady mother.

"How was she?" She asks, every question growing on top of the other. She feels like a child again, like Megga and Alla and someone who hoarded every pretty tale. "The songs say she wa kind and lovely, and fond of prayer. They say she was the most beautiful queen to ever reign, and all those who saw her loved her"

"She was all that and more. Intelligent, for one: often she confided in me that she wished to have been born a crofter'd daughter, for a chance at being a septa. For that and many reasons she was not as loved as the songs might tell it."

"The King did not love her." This she already knew, from the hours spend studying under Maester Luwin's tutelage, Robb squinting on one side and Arya fidgeting in the other. It seemed more of a tragedy, now, than a proper love song. Perhaps they were all tragedies, and she had been deaf to what that meant.

"No, nor did she love him." Ser Aemon's face did not so much twist as change angles. Ti was suddenly very easy to remember that he had been a Prince in his own right once, a leader and idol of men. "Nor did I love him."

"But you let him live." It was not a question, but it was not a demand either. Sansa had always been a scholar of songs, even now, even after everything. "Surely you had a greater support than him. People loved you. You could have opposed him, surely."  
"Yes, I could have." He says, terribly sure.

She does not know what to do with that declaration. It seemed too big to ask why.

Instead, she's asks "Do you think I should kill my king?", because after everything she has never killed anyone, not properly. Wars of the mind did not count.

Ser Aemon considers her question. He always considered everything. He spoke slowly, sad for her sake.

"I think you do not have a king. If you do, you should get rid of him. Yours is not a nature that should allow for obedience, my lady."

Sansa is quiet. She had never had nothing against being obedient before, at Winterfell. The injustice of it all burns at her. Defiance, she had found, is tiring and difficult and thrilling. It does not fit her easily.

(It ought to be Arya with the powers. But Arya was not one to wear power like this lightly like it needed to be, nor Robb would have been capable, Robb with the heavy copper crown she saw at night. Not even Bran, whom the trees favored above all others. T'was her, of course. This duty needed a lady's hand. )

Even packs have leaders, she thinks, but then she remembers she is not a part of the pack anymore.

Ser Aemon fades, not gone but unseen. The statues continue to stand in the place of honor, mute and dumb. People walk in and out of the sept. Their prayers drift up with the wisps of incense, fragile like if she blew on them they'd disperse forever. She stays there for a long time, a fake worshiper spying on wishes. Each one she holds close and remembers, hoards them as if coin in a treasury.

If no one else would care to hear them, she would.

 

 

In the quiet hours before evening, when the sky turns red and close-by, she wonders whether her lord father had prayed, before he had no mouth to hide prayers in. 

Deep down, she knows he did not. He was wise enough to know which words rustled the leaves of old trees, which silences were heavies and nobler. 

 

 

  
"Higher." Her father says, only it is not her father but a memory of him.

"Higher." Complains dream-Arya, always complaining, always demanding better of others.

"Higher?" considers Bran-who-sleeps, his little face thoughtful and sad. "Not so high. As high as you think it ought to be."

Sansa strains. The ice rises, cold as a winter wind, broad as a sword, high as the Iron Throne.

"Yes," she agrees. "Only as high as I want it to be."

 

 

 

**xv**

 

 

In their cave the lion and his daughter the lioness prepare a wedding. The groom to be sleeps beside a flightless creature bound to him. His slumber is dreamless with wine fumes. 

The bride to be does not sleep. She sharpens her weapons in moonlight and friendship and secrets, and bides her time. That is the nature of the flying, boundless mysteries of nature. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is mostly a filler chapter sorry bout that.

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi to me on [tumblr](http://searchingforserendipity25.tumblr.com).


End file.
